Henry fairlie biography

Henry Jones Fairlie (13 January 1924, in London, England – 25 February 1990, in Washington, D.C.) was a British political journalist and social critic, known for popularizing the term "the Establishment", an analysis of how "all the right people" came to run Britain largely through social connections.
Between the late 1970s and his death in 1990, Fairlie wrote dozens of essays about politics, culture, journalism, and American life for the magazine.
Henry Jones Fairlie was a British political journalist and social critic, known for popularizing the term "the Establishment", an analysis of how "all the right people" came to run Britain largely through social connections.

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Henry Fairlie on

22 JANUARY 1972, Page 11

The Secondary World of LBJ

The book*, like the man, is big. It is It is them, difficult, in considering either of to avoid sentences like that, so much se that one begins to think that one is, after all, Anthony Sampson; and that one must write a compendium. I have been an admirer of Mr Sampson's work for many a year: no one else could have adapted the methods of the Sears and Roebuck — in America — or the Selfridge's — in Britain catalogue and turned them into a literary form. We need him again. Since it is now vain to look to John Gunther to write " Inside Lyndon Johnson," will not Mr Sampson give us an Anatomy? For the moment, dear reader, you must be contented with me. In his odd little book about Harold Macmillan, who is a complex figure, Mr Sampson showed us how to avoid the complexity by saying that there are two Harold Macmillans, or Was it three? It seemed to me that he had, for once, missed his boat, and that he could have had the verve to give us two books, an "Anatomy of Mac," and an "Anatomy of Millan." I have been a s

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I had been in the country about eight years, and was living in Houston, when a Texas friend asked me one evening: “Why do you like living in America? I don’t mean why you find it interesting--why you want to write about it--but why you like living here so much.” After only a moment’s reflection, I replied, “It’s the first time I’ve felt free.” One spring day, shortly after my arrival in America, I was walking down the long, broad street of a suburb, with its sweeping front lawns (all that space), its tall trees (all that sky), and its clumps of azaleas (all that color). The only other person on the street was a small boy on a tricycle. As I passed him, he said, “Hi!”--just like that. No four-year-old boy had ever addressed me without an introduction before. Yet here was this one, with his cheerful “Hi!” Recovering from the culture shock, I tried to look down stonily at his flaxen head, but instead, involuntarily, I found myself saying in return: “Well--hi!” He pedaled off, apparently satisfied. He had begun my Americanization.

“Hi!” As I often say--for Americans do not real

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Sonia Purnell’s new biography, “Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue” (Viking), is a bit of a feminist reclamation project, bent on producing a more respectful portrait than those found in two earlier books, Christopher Ogden’s “Life of the Party: The Biography of Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman” (1994) and Sally Bedell Smith’s “Reflected Glory: The Life of Pamela Churchill Harriman” (1996). It’s time to set to rights, Purnell believes, Harriman’s reputation as, what she calls, a “conniving and ridiculous gold digger obsessed by sex.” I wasn’t entirely convinced that such a rescue operation was necessary. It’s true that the earlier books were meaner than Purnell’s, flecked with nineties snark and anonymous quotes. (Ogden’s was the product of an authorized-biography agreement gone sour.) And Harriman was certainly subject to gossip, some of it scurrilous and sexist. A nasty takedown in The New Republic by the glib British expat Henry Fairlie, published in 1988 under the headline “Shamela,” dubbed her a Washington widow of “vivid